Celtic's Champions League win over Barcelona an apt result on 125th anniversary of Parkhead club

On Tuesday evening 600 guests assembled in St Mary’s Church in the Calton
district of Glasgow to celebrate the momentous decision taken by a group of
men in the same building exactly 125 years previously.

Oh what a night: Celtic celebrated their 125th anniversary in style with a glorious win over Barcelona at ParkheadPhoto: GETTY

On Wednesday night a multitude of 60,000 gathered a little over a mile from the church to acclaim the latest legendary chapter of the story that began on Nov 6, 1887.

Rarely - if ever - can the intertwining of a football club and its history been more apt than was witnessed on these adjacent evenings, as Celtic exalted a century and a quarter of existence by beating the team generally considered to be the best in the world and perhaps even the most lavishly gifted in the history of the game.

If the key to understanding a passage of history is not to know what took place, but to ascertain what people at the time thought would happen, then Celtic’s origins yield exceptionally productive soil. Certainly, Brother Walfrid, the Marist priest of St Mary’s in 1887, had clear intentions when he proposed the club’s foundation.

The first - and undoubtedly the closest to his heart - was to generate what would now be called an income stream to sustain the provision of meals for poor Catholic children in the east end of Glasgow. The second was to emulate the achievement of Hibernian, who had sprung from similar roots amongst Irish migrants in Edinburgh and had, earlier in 1887, become the first team from the east of Scotland to win the Scottish Cup.

By the end of of Celtic’s inaugural season, the club had raised over £400 for charity, including £164 to the Poor Children’s Dinner Tables. On the field of play, Celtic reached the Scottish Cup final at the first time of asking, losing to Third Lanark, but winning the Glasgow Charity Cup in its first season and the club’s name was engraved alongside Hibernian’s on the trophy in their fourth season of existence.

Walfrid, it should be noted, had also insisted at the founding meeting of Celtic that the new entity should be pronounced Keltic and not with a soft ‘C’. Well, two out of three’s no’ bad, as they say in his former parish.

Of much more personal consequence for Walfrid was that in 1892, the year Celtic first won the Scottish Cup, he was transferred by his superiors to London to become headmaster of St Anne’s School, Whitechapel, never to work in Glasgow again.

By that time, Rangers were already established as Celtic’s opponents of choice - “the light blues are great favourites with the Parkhead crowd”, recorded one journal of the period.

In one respect, oddly enough, that remains true - although as an ironic consequence of the downfall of the other half of what was to become a deeply corrosive municipal schism - but who could have predicted as much in the early days of amiable rivalry?

Perhaps, though, there were those amongst Celtic’s founders who anticipated that the team would one day draw colossal crowds, like the 146,433 who flocked to their 1937 Scottish Cup encounter with Aberdeen. It was certainly beyond their imagination, though, that the insatiable hunger for spectacle would extend to domination of Europe in 1967.

Yet the common thread that binds the club envisaged by Brother Walfrid to Jock Stein’s Lisbon Lions and the side that confounded Barcelona this week is the ability of the poor relation to surpass the abundantly provided counterpart - a notion that resonates in the Celtic (with a K) love of wild romanticism.

The most impressive feature of the 1967 triumph over Inter Milan is that Stein moulded a group of players all born within 30 miles of Celtic Park into a team who realigned European football. Before 1967 only teams from the three Latin countries - Spain, Portugal and Italy - had won the European Cup.

For 15 of the 16 years after Celtic’s victory in Lisbon, the trophy was monopolised by English, Dutch and German teams, while Celtic themselves reached another final in 1970 and semi-finals in 1972 and 1974. Such feats are almost beyond the bounds of probability now that broadcast revenues flow to the most lucrative mass markets, which do not include Holland or Portugal, far less Scotland.

Celtic’s TV income is infinitesimal compared with even the worst performing Premier League club and it would have no impact on Barcelona’s budget. An eloquent tale was told by the strength of their respective benches on Wednesday, with Tito Vilanova able to call upon the likes of David Villa, Gerard Piqué and Cesc Fabregas. Of Neil Lennon’s seven, four were raw teenagers.

Still, the transcending joy of football is its capacity to accommodate high art alongside broad brushstroke melodrama and it was with the latter that Celtic stole Wednesday’s show.

As some of his players, quite literally, were on their knees with fatigue, Neil Lennon removed Mikael Lustig, a defender, and threw on Tony Watt, an 18 year-old who was once so intimidated at training by even modest criticism from his older team-mates that he was reduced to tears and choking speechlessness.

But on Wednesday he was fluent in the football Esperanto of run, touch and shoot when he fastened on to Fraser Forster’s punt - missed, astonishingly, in schoolboy fashion by the Barca captain, Xavi Hernandez - and beat Victor Valdes for a winning goal which is already engraved in Celtic’s chronicles.

Who -including Walfrid - would dare to forecast what the next 125 years will bring? Certainly not this correspondent. Mind you, the news that Glasgow is to erect a monument to the victims of the Irish Famine, the survivors of whom fled in such irresistible waves to the city - hence Celtic’s provenance - was welcomed by the Rangers Supporters Assembly, who have offered to contribute to the costs.

Perhaps Glasgow is about to experience a new birth of tolerance, from and for all its shades of football colours. You never can tell, as Walfrid no doubt realised whenever he eventually gave up saying: “It’s pronounced Keltic, you know.”